In a land swept by typhoons and shaken by earthquakes, how have Japan's tallest and seemingly flimsiest old buildings-500 or so wooden pagodas - remained standing for centuries? Records show that only two have collapsed during the past 1,400 years. Those that have disappeared - and many have - were destroyed by fire as a result of lightning or civil war. The disastrous Hanshin earthquake in 1995 killed 6,400 people, toppled elevated highways, flattened office blocks and devastated the port area of Kobe. Yet it left the magnificent five-story pagoda at the Toji Temple in Kyoto undamaged.

Japanese scholars have been mystified for ages about why these tall, slender buildings are so stable. In“earthquake country” Japan, it was only 30 years ago that the building industry felt confident enough to erect office blocks of steel and reinforced concrete that had more than a dozen floors. Yet in 826, with only pegs and wedges* to keep his wooden structure upright, the master builder Kobodaishi built Toji pagoda soaring 55 meters into the sky - nearly half as high as the Kasumigaseki skyscraper built some eleven centuries later. Though it burned down four times after being struck by lightning, the latest version of Kobodaishi's classic structure has stood its ground since 1644. Clearly, 1)Japanese carpenters of the day knew a few tricks about allowing a building to swing settle itself rather than fight nature's forces and fall apart into pieces. But what sort of tricks?

The multi-story pagoda came to Japan from China in the sixth century as the stone-built watch towers or towers for worship, with the introduction of Buddhism. In Japan, however, the architecture was freely adapted to meet the local conditions. 2)The Japanese pagoda has evolved from an observation tower that is itself observed.In addition to earthquakes, the Japanese islands get battered by a couple of dozen typhoons in the summer. Japanese builders have learned to extend the eaves** of pagodas much further out from the walls. This prevents rainwater from gushing down the walls and into the foundations, softening the soil and causing the building eventually to subside or even collapse. For centuries, many thought that, like a tall pine tree, the Japanese pagoda - with its massive trunk-like central pillar known as a shinbashira-simply flexes and swings when riding out a typhoon or an earthquake. But the answer is not so simple.

A number of things ensure that a pagoda works nothing like a pine tree. The most startling one is that the trunk-like shinbashira carries no load at all. In some pagoda designs, it does not even rest on the ground. but is suspended from the top of the pagoda-hanging loosely in a well down ( A ) the middle of the building. Also, a five-story pagoda contains not even one pillar that travels right up ( A ) the building to carry the structural loads from the top to the bottom (under Japan's current building codes, wooden buildings with two or three stories must have pillars connecting the roof firmly to the foundations).

Second peculiarity is that the wide eaves that overhang their individual stories are deliberately loaded down with heavy roof tiles. Imagine the branches of a tree weighed down with snow. They would be torn from the trunk in the first breeze. So the ( B ) as well as the size of the eaves must be a clue to the pagoda's ability to survive.

Another feature that makes a pagoda unlike a tree is that its individual stories are not actually attached to one another. They are simply stacked one on top of another like a pile of hats. What joints there are between the floors are loosely fitting wooden brackets*** that allow each story to slide.

Now, let's solve the tricks of the pagoda's stability based on the above features. If the shinbashira plays no structural role, what on earth does it actually do? It is by far the largest piece of timber in the building, and hinoki tree-building material of shinbashira-is an incredibly expensive piece of wood. Furthermore, the shinbashira is strictly a Japanese invention. It is not found in pagodas elsewhere. What the early craftsmen had found by ( C ) was that a pagoda's loose stack of individual floors could be made to slide sideways to and fro independent of one another. In other words, viewed from the side, the pagoda appeared to being doing a snake dance - with each consecutive floor moving in the opposite direction to the ones immediately above and below. In short, the shinbashira was acting like an enormous stationary pendulum, such as seen in “old grandfather clock.”

And what of the extra-wide eaves with their heavy tiles? Think of them as a tightrope walker's balancing pole. Because of inertial effects, the bigger the mass at each end of the pole, the easier it is for the tightrope walker to maintain his balance. 3)The same holds true for a pagpda. With the eaves extending out on all sides like balancing poles, the building responds to even the most powerful jolt of an earthquake with a graceful swaying.

The secret of the Japanese pagoda's enduring strength and stability is exposed. It is in effect 4)the sum of three mutually reinforcing factors. Together, the whole is a quite extraordinary feat of structural engineering, using poise and balance in place of brute strength.

注)
• *杭とくさび
• **(家の)軒， ひさし
• ***L字型の取り付け用具

• 〔1〕下線部 1)を日本語に訳しなさい。
• 〔2〕下線部 2)において，筆者はどのようなことを述べようとしているか，説明しなさい。
• 〔3〕下線部 3)が示す内容を，説明しなさい。
• 〔4〕下線部 4)は，具体的には何を指すのか，50～80字以内で述べなさい。
• 〔5〕( A )に入る最も適切なものを, 選択肢から選び記号で答えなさい。
  • (a) along
  • (b) from
  • (c) on
  • (d) through
  • (e) with
• 〔6〕( B )に入る英語一語を答えなさい。
• 〔7〕( C )に入る最も適切なものを, 選択肢から選び記号で答えなさい。
  • (a) comparison and contrast
  • (b) point and purpose
  • (c) question and answer
  • (d) trial and error